For the past three days, I’ve been obsessed with reformatting my first two novels. I never realized I had OCD until I began editing my books.

For many, readers notice small errors and think, “Why can’t this author just get a good editor?” For those of us who have published, we can tell you it’s not as easy as you believe. First, getting a book edited costs a fortune. With Emily and Jake’s Story being my first, I decided to use a professional editor through Amazon CreateSpace. These are the people who, for a fee, help indie authors publish paperback books. They offer all kinds of services from editing to formatting to design layouts. Because of the popularity of self-publishing, many big publishing houses have turned to the business of helping indies publish–a laughable irony since most of our query letters don’t get past the people who open their mail. My first two books cost me $5000.00 to edit. NO LIE! I don’t think I’ve made that money back, especially since Emily’s Story has been free for a while.

If money is no object, there’s the issue of a 120,000 word document (Delaney and Donovan’s Story were over 200,000 words) having at least that many possible errors. There are times when I won’t detect that I used the wrong form of “too” in this sample sentence: “I went too the market, too.” I know that third word should be spelled “to” but my eyes glaze over it because I know already know it’s supposed to be “to.” And of course, there’s my biggest nightmare of finding missing quotation marks. Dear God! In the midst of 6,000 quotations marks, it’s hard to spot the missing seven.

What I’ve started doing since Max & Jane’s Story is to have multiple editors. Ideally, I like to have many sets of trained eyes reading the story and catching all the silly errors. It’s funny how very few people catch the same errors and I love that. It’s become a bit of a contest between two of my editors to see who can catch more errors. Missing quotes are the biggest coup. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Right before I was off to publish Unfinished Melody, I caught the word “beach” spelled as “beache.” There were eight of us who edited the book. None of us caught it the first time. It wasn’t until I read the book three straight times that I saw it. Why don’t I have more people who edit for me? It takes a considerable amount of work to edit edited work. And thus, I like working with people who’ve been with me for a while. I don’t have beta readers, I just have editors.

Why am I rambling on a Saturday afternoon about book editing when I’ve teased you with a title that says you’ll be receiving something? I’m glad you asked. Since Emily’s Story and Jake’s Story were professionally edited, I didn’t think to worry. But after receiving an email from a Reider, I decided to take a look at the documents again. To my horror, the formatting was corrupted and there were a good number of missing quotes. After five freakin’ thousand dollars, there were enough errors to keep me glued to my computer for three days. Even after scouring Jake’s document several times over, find/replace is telling me I still have two more end quotes than beginning quotes. This could mean I started a quote without ending with one. Or, I added an unnecessary quotation mark at the beginning of the sentence. Or, it could mean I spaced the words out improperly and what should be an end quote turned into a beginning quote. If anyone finds these two missing quotation mark, send it to my attention and I’ll have you read Perfect Harmony as one of my editors. After wrangling with these two documents for three days, and getting only two hours of sleep last night, I decided to wave the white flag.

So finally! The surprise. For those of you who did not order a paperback copy of Emily’s Story and Jake’s Story, you did not receive the bonus excerpts in each book. There are two deleted chapters from Emily, and Jake talks about his wedding and wedding night. I’ve uploaded the new copies this morning. Kindle updated my webpage and the new e-books are there. If you have copies of both books on your Kindle, you can just “update.” You do NOT need to buy the books again. If the books are not updating properly (as some of my Kindle books have not), just delete Emily’s Story and download the new (free) version. As for Jake’s Story, it should allow you to update soon.

For iBooks and Nook, they haven’t updated yet so give it until Monday night. I have to go through Smashwords for these books and I don’t think they work on the weekends.

So there you go. A very long-winded explanation for a few extra pages of reading. Have a fun rest of your weekend. Don’t forget…this week starts the Monday AND Thursday blogs!

P.S. If there are any errors in this publication, please excuse the bleary-eyed typos. 🙂

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It’s been a fun weekend of reading what you all had to say about my latest book, Unfinished Melody. I’ll admit, I was scared releasing a non-Reid book. I didn’t know how sales would be, and I had no idea what your reactions would be to this storyline.

While it thrills me to know you liked the story, I’ve been quite surprised with your reactions to Marni, Melody, Noah, and Ben, especially. I didn’t think Ben would be so vilified. Perhaps with the second book, you might change you mind–or maybe not? Please keep in mind that Ben just lost his wife of ten years. He wants the best for his baby daughter, and he’s tormented with the fact that he has feelings for his sister-in-law/ex-girlfriend/best friend/Ali’s caretaker. He’s trying to work out his head and his heart.

In the meanwhile, Noah has manned up and decided to take his relationship with Marni to the ultimate level. What will happen with the three characters? I believe I know, but I’m unsure. Tons of ideas are swirling and I’ve yet to put any of it down on paper. What I can tell you is that each chapter will begin with a flashback. There, you’ll get answers to the Marni-Ben-Melody relationship, as well as the Marni-Noah-Siena relationship.

If you’ve yet to read the book, I highly encourage you to pick up a copy from Amazon Kindle, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords. Then, you can join in our conversation and tell me what you think of my heroes and heroine. For those of you who have read the book and written a review, I thank you! In our family, we never just say thank you. We always try and re-gift. You ladies who have done me the huge favor of writing a review, please email (dw@dwcee.com) me a screenshot of the review and I’ll send you the first chapter of Perfect Harmony when I have it written. I know some of your pen names, but not all.

Finally, Love! Michael & Chloe’s Story is the Word doc. of choice these days as I try and finish up Vol.1 and put it up for pre-sale by Monday. It’s almost March, which means that Michael AND Chloe are both taking turns talking. Boy, do they have a lot to say. Many of you believe you know where this story is headed. I say keep an open mind. Where I take you may be a wilder ride than the first two blogs.

I’m in the midst of writing April blogs and Brendan has decided he needs a say. He has something very exciting happening in his life and he may or may not share it with Chloe. We shall see. Young (fictional) love–when you have tons of money, beautiful people all around you, and no consequence that can’t be erased with a few clever wordings–gotta love it!

Hope you’re enjoying the blogs. Share your thoughts with us after each Monday and Thursday (yes, Thursday!) posts. Wishing you a productive week!

I suppose it wouldn’t do not to have a teaser? Here you go.

Michael: Can’t-remember Friend

Men envy my title and status. Women desire my wealth and family name. What neither realizes is that my life sucks!

I fell in love with a woman who fell back in love with her man back home. There was no changing her mind once that damn American came on his white horse to woo her back to Reid Place. Before my tears could dry and my heart start mending, he had knocked her up with twins, married her, and bought her the house of every girls’ dreams.

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Wait no more! The book is here. For those of you who pre-ordered with iBooks, you should already be reading your copy. It published early Thursday morning. For the rest of you, here are the links to your copy.

Happy reading (so hard to write that word correctly 🙂 ) and please let me know your thoughts. I appreciate every personal email and review I receive. I’d love to hear feedback from the “regulars” as well as first-time commenters. All are welcome.

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I went searching for a heart image to represent Valentine’s Day and I thought, “DUH!” practically every one of my covers has a heart. Rather than the typical red heart, I thought I’d give you Jake’s blue heart.

I wish you ladies a very HAPPY Valentine’s Day. To make this day even better, chapters 3 are all up in the Soon-to-be-Reids section of my website. Book is coming out soon. Get your pre-order in for iBooks and be the first one to read Marni, Ben & Noah’s story.